[caddemon]

I think a lot of the real world occurrences of this phenomenon are actually due to bad incentive structures though. For example if you finish early (or go under budget) on a project you can generally expect the next project to have a tighter deadline/allowance.

A friend of mine was a postal worker for a brief period a couple decades ago, and at that time (in his location at least) he was told to make sure he took the full day to complete his route, because if there was a consistent pattern of finishing early they would lay off some of the workers.

It's not always possible to make sure incentives are well balanced, but managers should at least take a minute to put themselves in the shoes of the employees. If finishing early has only negative consequences, then maybe that could be addressed directly instead of just setting impossibly early deadlines